brother, that's what a world view is lmao, do you not understand this concept?
Most of us don't really go anywhere outside of the US, the entire continental US is the literal equivalent of the collective EU. What do you want me to say? I literally don't need to leave to US to experience something geographically unique.
In point of fact Americans have gotten impressive results out of far more complicated metrics than metric. It's not a matter of understanding, it's a matter of pride. And of not having to buy all new tools.
For proof that this thread is just people justifying what they know as better somehow, look no further than Canada.
We do cooking temps in Fahrenheit, weather in Celsius. Human weights in pounds, but never pounds and oz. Food weights in grams, cooking weights in pounds and oz. Liquid volume in millilitres and litres, but cooking in cups, teaspoons and tablespoons. Speed & distance in kilometres, heights in feet and inches.
Try and give this any consistency and people will look at you like you’re fucked. The next town is 100km over, I’m 5ft 10in, a can of soda is 355ml, it’s 21c out and I have the oven roasting something at 400f. Tell me it’s 68f out and I will fight you.
People like what they are used to, and will bend over backwards to justify it. This becomes blatantly obvious when you use a random mix of units like we do, because you realize that all that matters is mental scale.
If Fahrenheit is “how people feel” then why are feet useful measurements of height when 90% of people are between 4ft and 6ft? They aren’t. You just know the scale in your head, so when someone says they’re 7ft tall you say “dang that’s tall”. That’s it.
Fahrenheit: let's use "really cold weather" as zero and really hot weather as 100.
I don't really have a horse in this race but this logic doesn't seem legit to me.
How is -17°C really cold weather AND 37°C really hot weather?
One is actively trying to kill you if weren't already dead by the time the weather got that bad. The other just makes your nuts stick to your thighs -- if you're in a humid place.
I'd agree with the logic if 100F was equal to something like 65°C. 🤷♂️
then why are feet useful measurements of height when 90% of people are between 4ft and 6ft? They aren’t. You just know the scale in your head, so when someone says they’re 7ft tall you say “dang that’s tall”. That’s it.
to be clear, we use feet and inches, and there is historical precedent for breaking things down once they get past a certain grouping, we only have 10 fingers after all. To me the difference between 200cm and 220 is literally fuck all. You ask me the difference between 4 ft and 6ft and i can pretty quickly tell you.
I find it weird that when measuring height in metric, people using cm exclusively, i've noticed this a lot actually, people will use cm or mm in places where it arguably doesn't make any sense. I could see the justification for doing math maybe, but like, that defeats the whole point of it being metric no?
Shouldn't you be using meters and cm for height specifically? Since most people are a good bit over one meter i feel like it would make sense to do it that way. But then again that's just kind of a shit bucket worth of options you have, ideally you would use decimeters, but nobody uses those things for some reason.
Most of Europe just uses metres for people’s height. 1.67m, like that. I have no mental picture of that, so it doesn’t work for me. But they don’t seem to have any trouble, further evidence that it’s all just what you know.
I find it weird that when measuring height in metric, people using cm exclusively, i’ve noticed this a lot actually, people will use cm or mm in places where it arguably doesn’t make any sense. I could see the justification for doing math maybe, but like, that defeats the whole point of it being metric no?
Why is that defeating the whole point of being metric? If you know someone is 183 cm tall, you also know that they are 1.83 m tall. If its easier to say the length in cm, you do. No need for "one meter and eighty-three centimeters" or "one point eighty-three meters", just "a hundred and eighty-three centimeters". Often you just skip saying the "centimeters" part as well, because most people can see that you're not the size of a skyscraper without getting a ruler out.
If that was true outsiders should be able to use Fahrenheit without much explanation. I've never got a clue what the °F values mean, I always have to use a converter. It's really not as intuitive as people who grew up with it seem to believe.
By that logic, Americans should use km/h instead of mph. Going 0-100 is much better than 0-60. For the same reason you keep telling us why Fahrenheit is so much more intuitive.
100mph is like, actually kinda spooky though. 100 kmh isn't spooky. Also 60mph ties nicely into the seconds/minutes/hours time dichotomy, which is fun.
Where i live it can go up to 53°C in the summer.
In summer when there is a streak of very hot days and there's like a 41°C day, you will hear people out saying " oh, today it's quite cool, that's nice!"
Sounds like a great time to propose my system of temperature: Super Celsius. I'll connect it to the freezing and boiling points of water just like Celsius, but while freezing remains at 0, boiling is now 1000. Get ready for a nice mild day of 250.
No, we should go back to the ancientBabylonian base-60 system. So a chilly 30°F day would be ⟨⟨⟨°B (B for Babylonian) and a scorching 100°F is ||-°B, or ↓↓→°B if you like. There's not really a solid way to write cuneiform on a cell phone keyboard.
Once again... the classic argument of:
"Well, I grew up using this system, and I'm used to the system. I have built an internal intuition for how hot and cold the temperature is. I am used to >100 being hot! 40 is not hot!"
Well then. I grew up using celcius and... "IT'S FOURTY FUCKING ONE DEGREES OUTSIDE?" sounds just as hot.
Yeah, I grew up in Fahren-wasteland, but have lived in Celsi-heaven for 7 years. I embraced it, and now when someone says "40 FUCKING DEGREES!!" I know exactly what they're talking about. It's hot. You probably don't have an air con. It's misery.
No.. I get it.. 41 < 105.. I totally agree haha funny joke. I'm just over this debate. Who gives a fuck what temperature scale you use? Just use the one you know. We have conversions for that reason.
Yeah, but you can't argue that adding a whole digit doesn't make it seem bigger. And take a kid who doesn't yet know either system. They for sure will think 107 is hotter then 41.
That said, I wish everywhere that gave a temp in the US would give both so I could get a better sense of Celsius. Most apps and such let you choose one or the other, but not both.
On the other hand it dilutes the effect of lower values because a lot of them are double digit. 20F, 40F, 60F... all double digit, but wildly varying. On the other hand, with Celsius you get:
Below 0: There's ice/snow.
0: Things are freezing/thawing (depending on what the temperature was before.
it's not about what makes more sense: what makes more sense is what you use everyday and is natural to you. 40+ C is freaking hot because when you experience it, it's freaking hot.
It's about what the entire rest of the world is using as a standard.
In Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, the number of thieves wasn't really necessarily 40. The number was likely just chosen because 40 was an exaggerated number, much like when we'd say "I've told you a hundred million times". So 40 as a shorthand for "a huge amount" seems fitting in celcius.
Fahrenheit literally meant to base the scale with 100 being human body temp.
It was later rescaled by Cavendish to put the freezing point of water at exactly 32 and boiling point at exactly 212, giving a nicely-divisible 180-degree separation between freezing and boiling. That shift is why body temperature is 98.6.
I love it when it's 50ish out and sunny. You don't get all sweaty, plus you can wear cozy socks and sweaters or just go out in short sleeves and both are perfectly fine. The bugs all start going into hiding at that temperature but the grass and leaves are still green
As a European I can perfectly feel the 0 degree. I step outside and 5 seconds later I can tell you if it's below zero or not.
For me "it's now really hot" in summer is exactly when it's over 30C. It being 86F doesn't make any more sense. Approximately above 35C I will avoid going outside. Which would be 95F, not 100.
From here, the temps in summer in the south of Europe are often around 100F at peak. Above or below doesn't matter.
All that Fahrenheit scale is good for is if you live in a continental climate, more to the south, e.g. some useless place like Oklahoma, where 0F is approximately year low, and 100F is approximately year high.
For all other places, where the temperature delta over the course of the year is not as extreme, this Fahrenheit scale is as unintuitive as celcius, e.g. you just get used to it.
As is typically responded to this 'response': there are a large number of people-many European-who would unironically say that 50°F (10°C) is, in fact, the ideal temperature.
They're wrong, of course, but they exist.
But you're also assuming that the exact middle of the range is where the ideal sweet spot should be. That's wrong. People generally can better handle larger temperature deviations that are colder than their ideal than hotter deviations.
Fahrenheit isn’t how people feel, otherwise 50° would be perfect temperature.
it is though? It's like perfectly comfortable because you can dress up just enough to where you're actually wearing a decent bit of clothing, but you can also dress down to a pretty light set of clothing as well.
This is also ignoring that this is both, arbitrary, and also completely subjective to the person.
The human body might end up liking 70f more than 50f, purely because it's 96f inside the body, so something lower to allow heat transfer, but not low enough to be physically uncomfortable would be more expected.
Actually, here's a good question, why do you land on the 50f point? Are you expecting the middle to be the most optimal point of perfection? Or is this just a metric brain thing?
What annoys me about that phrasing, is that "how water feels" is quite relevant to how humans feel.
The obvious example is that if it's below 0°C, it starts freezing, which causes slippery sidewalks, snow, dry air, all that stuff.
But just in general having a feeling how much water will evaporate and later precipitate at certain temperatures, and even stuff like how hot beverages and cooking temperatures are, it's all still relevant for humans...
The obvious example is that if it’s below 0°C, it starts freezing, which causes slippery sidewalks, snow, dry air, all that stuff.
But just in general having a feeling how much water will evaporate and later precipitate at certain temperatures, and even stuff like how hot beverages and cooking temperatures are, it’s all still relevant for humans…
that's an interesting idea, BUT, the boiling point for water also exists under f as well, it's just 212 f, which if you want to round for convenience, is 200f. 100f is just about half the boiling point of water.
I guess you celsius folks might be more water pilled than the average US citizen, but it's not like it's impossible.
Forty-one sounds insanely hot as an outside temperature if that's the standard you're used to. And that's the thing that the Fahrentards refuse to wrap their head around.
Fahernhaters are always like, "nooo!! 40 degrees is so hot!!" Meanwhile, the fahrenchad's resting body temperature is nearly 2.5 times hotter. All fahernhaters would die at that temperature.
I present the temperature scale that I made up- the Human Scale (H°)
I thought about the Fahrenheit vs Celsius debate, and I think both have practical uses, however I think combined they could make a very practical scale.
Fahrenheit: while my American sensibilities agree that 100° is a good marker for what % of my patience is used up to cut a bitch, I think a similar place would be the average human body temperature. For this reason, 100°H = 98.6°F . It's not a perfect match, but it can still give us the satisfaction of "IT'S 100°!?" while having practical implications for medical uses "your body temperature is 102°, 2° warmer than average".
Celsius: I think this scale makes a ton of sense for colder temperatures. When the thermometer reads 0°, that's when you can expect snow. For this reason, 0°H = 0°C.
The conversation rates are:
H = (F-32) × 1.5
H= C × 2.7
More precise is
H = (F-32) × 1.501501501...
H = C × 2.7027027027...
While using the freezing point of water and the average human body temperature seem like inconsistent and arbitrary benchmarks, my goal is less about consistency and more about practicality for everyday use.
I believe the Fahrenheit scale was originally set up for 100° to be human body temperature. We're just built colder now I guess? I had to look up what zero was and apparently he originally set it at the coldest the air had ever been around his village, but later had to standardize it and so cooked up some brine that froze at 0°.
I would propose that 100 should be calibrated around the wet bulb temperature, which I think is around 105°F but varies with humidity. That's the temperature where sweating doesn't cool you off any more, so any temperature 100 or more is deadly to most people. I like 0 being freezing for water, seems sensible and is also a good "prolonged exposure to this or lower will kill you" cutoff point.
I heard it was supposed to be human body temperature, but they used horse body temperature instead because it was close to human body temperature but more... stable.
the wet bulb temperature1 is just the temperature of a wet thermometer, and varies with humidity and temperature. Wet bulb temp is never higher than the dry bulb temp, so (entertainingly) you're proposing that the meaning of 100° varies wildly and is always lower than the true temperature, effectively making the air temperature always ≥100°, and increases when the air is drier, like some sort of inverse relative humidity.
1(I'm aware you probably didn't mean wet bulb temperature here, but let's have fun with the idea) :)
There's a few meme images around that Celsius is how water "feels" and Fahrenheit is how people feel (and Kelvin is how atoms feel), which isn't entirely off base....
But frankly, I would support human scale more than Fahrenheit. I live in a country with Celsius, and my only real gripe with it is that whole degrees are not very precise. You have to go to half-degrees, or even 1/10th of a degree to get reasonable precision on temperature.
Just seems like the human scale would work well for 90% of use cases, aside from science where we should be using either Celsius or Kelvin.
the problem is that the average body temperature is slowly decreasing, so this isn't that well defined, we would need to link it to an event that is at constant temperature
also the celsius scale isn't that good imo because it's about the freezing and boiling of water at ambient pressure so it isn't universal
I say we set the boltzmann constant to a known value, and define temperatures from there
after that we find a range of temperature with useful round values and offset the scale for everyday use
So I had to look up the Boltzmann constant and... That's a lot of math.
I think you have a point on the decreasing human temperature. It looks like the decrease is at 0.05°F every decade, which actually is quite a bit. If it was something like 0.005°F, I'd say that that's a problem for the people of the year 2500 to solve.
That said, the reason it's been decreasing seems to be due to medical advances and not some change in the Earth's gravity or climate change. I would be surprised to see humans in the year 2500 having an average body temperature of 72.9°F, or closing in on 0°F in the year 3,984. I imagine there will be fluctuations, but there's got to be a lower limit to what is physically possible.
I'd still defend the Celsius number, since even though there are changes due to air pressure, it's changing over space and not time. In the year 2500, water at sea level will still freeze at 0°C.
I think my big thing is I'm less concerned about a logically consistent scale, and more towards a scale that's geared to the emotional side of temperature.
Thinking outloud moment
If we are going for the emotional side of temperature specifically, we would also need to factor in wind, humidity, sunlight, what season it is, etc. and that's a lot of variables, and even then that's how you get the wind-chill factor. But even that is almost completely subjective. I feel like that scale would go from "IT'S GOTTA BE NEGATIVE A MILLION FUCKIN' DEGREES" to "I FEEL LIKE IM ON THE SURFACE OF THE SUN, so like a bazillion degrees" and then we go to the traffic report.
Either way, it's not a perfect scale, but I'd still take that over the other two.
Behold! "Disagree Degrees". We're going to combine the best traits of the other units. No more searching for the stupid little degree character in the character map. D for degrees or disagrees - whatever, I don't give a shit.
0D = 0K (Like Kelvin, no negatives! That's so dumb!)
0.4D = -40 C and -40 F
1D = Water Freezing point (Need a consistent point of scale)
10D = "Pleasant temperature"
100D = Kind of hot
500D = Really hot for people (>40C or >100F) "It's like 500 disagrees out there!"
1000D= Water boiling (To match the freezing temp)
1,000,000,000,000D = Surface of the sun
Good luck on the math converting to other units, this temperature scale isn't about being useful for nerd stuff, it's all about appealing to our emotions.
Which is the closest thing to a legitimate criticism of celcius that exists. The entire top half of the scale (everything over ~50°, that is) is pretty much useless as far as judging the weather is concerned.
mild in what way? Do you live in death valley??? Have you ever experienced 100f? You can literally get heat exhaustion, and heat stroke from temperatures of 110f pretty easily if you aren't watching yourself, we remind ourselves of this constantly anytime it gets hot.
“Bigger number is more better” also explains American sports where you get 3 points for running a bit and then play stops for an ad break and the national anthem.
I mean... assuming you're talking about American football, there's at least one scoring move that awards one point, so it makes sense for more difficult scoring moves to give more points. The harder the action is to complete, the more points you get for doing it.
I think the reason people are saying that Fahrenheit "feels" right is because we use a base 10 number system. 1-10 and 0%-100% feel right to us because of this. If you somehow knew nothing about each temperature unit, but you did know base 10, I feel like Fahrenheit would be more intuitive. Obviously if you grew up with Celsius that would feel normal.
Disclaimer: I feel like the US needs to adopt metric already. It's so much better.
If you somehow knew nothing about each temperature unit, but you did know base 10, I feel like Fahrenheit would be more intuitive.
Would it though? Because it's not like people who didn't grew up with Fahrenheit can just intuitively use and interpret it. Maybe base ten is "more intuitive", but I'd argue not to any meaningful degree. Both scales have to be explained, experienced, and tied to personal reference points.
While I agree 107 is 107 and it sucks regardless, at like 30% humidity my sweat can evaporated and do it's job of keeping me cooler, at 98% humidity your sweat has a much much harder time evaporating and it actively feels hotter. The time I spent living in Florida taught me that yes dry heat is absolutely better.
Nice vid. He isn't wrong. Though maybe we could come up with a compromise temperature scale for everyone to use. Even 100 F isn't as uncommon as it used to be. But I would love to have more granularity without decimals.
I'm gonna be honest. I love Celsius for the the whole perfect math reasons with calories and water based measurement...
But the curve on temps is a pain when all the nice temperatures require using a decimal place to decide just how slightly above or below pleasant it is but cold is basically everything from 16°C to -30°C
And then decimals really matter when hotter than pleasant temps.
Whole rounded integers are just so vastly different depending how high or low you are in Celsius.
I don't know man, I've lived my entire life in a country that only uses Celsius and I've never seen a single place or person using decimals to display temperature we always use whole numbers.
I get your point but the difference in 1 degree in Celsius is still very insignificant to the point we don't really need decimals at all.
I've been all over the world. Trust me seeing 21.6 or other decimals is not uncommon you and others are really just pushing hard on the ideas that there is no flaws and none of the quirks of Celsius.
I literally just set an air conditioner to 20.5°C. I don't get why lie like this.
But really it is much better for human temperatures.
It's just intuitive, 0F is 100% cold, and 100F is 100% hot.
When the dry bulb gets above 100F, wind only cools you down by sweat evaporation, and when the wet bulb gets above 100F, even that can't cool you down, and you will die if you don't get to a cooler or drier environment.
"Intuitive" is a meaningless metric for a single scaled number. Whichever system you are used to will be the more "intuitive".
Also, climate can play into which system feels more useful. Where I live, 100F occurs only rarely (and since air conditioning is almost ubiquitous, not something I'd bother looking out for), while 0C is an outdoor temperature that I do need to be aware of for half the year.
I disagree that either would be just as intuitive. Fahrenheit being 0=cold and 100=hot is intuitive because there are a lot of things we do in the world that exist on a scale of 0 - 100. Percentages, just off the bat. Also, fahrenheit has a higher degree of fidelity in the temperature range that we use.
Celsius's general temperature scale is like -10 - 40 which is absolutely not intuitive because it doesn't look like any other scale we use as humans. I agree that we get used to Celsius fast and it's a fine it's not like it's super confusing (and Celsius is so much more useful scientifically).
Also isn't 101 also really really hot? Or what about 99? And how about 1, isn't that also really really cold? It is an arbitrary frame of reference you have set up in an attempt to make a non-intuitive system more easily accesible.
Lol it is the same reason why you all argue for metric though? Celsius is random numbers nonsense. Fahrenheit is a scale that makes sense. 0 freeze, 100 boil. Don't you metric heads love that shit or you just lying the whole time?
100F was defined as the human body temperature (The guy they used had a cold or something so it's off by a degree and a half.)
That's useful for perception of heat. When the dry bulb gets above 100F, wind only cools you down by sweat evaporation, and when the wet bulb gets above 100F, even that can’t cool you down, and you will die if you don’t get to a cooler or drier environment.
So you're saying that 0 and 100 aren't intuitively obvious? I find that really strange when it's doing a better job keeping to base 10 than the metric system in this particular use case.
If I said a movie was a 7/10, you would understand what that means because it's a scale. You don't have to "grow up" using a 0-10 scale to understand it.
Like if I asked you to rate something on a scale of 4-17, you'd understand what I mean. The numbers are different but the concept of a scale remains the same.
this is so true, but the thing the celsiouds won't understand, that the farenheitoids haven't realized, is that the celsius users die (not literally) in heat of about 85 f which for any fahrenheit user is, literally a nice summer day.
EDIT: i'm making a joke about the UK heat waves, since people don't seem to realize that.
Humidity plays a big part of that I think. Like, don't older folks start dropping in England around 85-90f because of the humidity there? In Phoenix 107 sucks hard, but it's dry so you can still effectively cool off.
the humidity certainly doesn't help, but believe it or not, it gets humid here in the US too. We get high humidity 85f days out here, if you're doing yard work, whatever clothing you're wearing is literally going to be soaked in sweat, it's not funny.
The bigger problem in some cases, is that european houses are designed differently to american houses, so the houses tended to be unbearably warm unless they had AC. Though a lot of people were still losing it with how hot 85f was outside.
Dry heat is "nicer" only in the sense that at the same temperature, you sweat less. That's it, 100f compared to 80f and humid, both are equally shit, one is just going to drench you in sweat and make you feel disgusting, while the other is going to exhaust you, drench you in sweat, and leave you feeling dry. With wet sticky clothing.
the US also has hot climates though? Have you looked the coverage of latitude that the US has? We have everything from directly on the equator, to about as near the north pole as you can get.
would someone explain to me why whenever european people are confronted with the idea of the imperial system their brain seems to shutdown into a slow state of oxygen preservation? I genuinely don't understand it.
"40c in f is 104????" yeah, round it, its 100f, you think we specify to the Nth degree here?
"86f doesn't really make sense" yeah, round it. 90 is pretty close, and who boy 90s are pretty hot.
"why isn't 50f the perfect temperature" you're literally just applying an arbitrary point on something entirely arbitrary. But ok. (also it is the perfect temperature range between 50-70f)
"how is -17c and 37c cold and hot???" literally round it bro, -20 and 40c are right there wow look at that now it makes more sense! Im pretty sure this commenter is aussie or something, so in their defense, anything under 70f is cold for them. Either that or they don't wear clothes, ever, because they're calculating the coldness with no clothing. for some reason.
"yeah but we also think of things in relation to the temperature of water, like freezing is when shit is icy, and also the relation to the boiling point" brother, water boils in fahrenheit as well (212f, but again, you're going to shocked by this one, you can round it down to 200f, wow look at that, it's like, pretty close.) sure the freezing point is still higher, but you really only get freezes here at super prolonged periods of just under 30f weather, or really cold snaps that stick around a bit. generally snow in 30f weather is, not really a thing, the ground is still warm enough it melts. ice doesn't form unless it's like, close to 0.
guys, i promise, it's not this hard. Just, think about it a little bit, please. You're killing me here!
Idk why you guys are so passionate about this whole rounding thing? Rounding off 107 to 100 doesn't change the information, only the precision. It's not easier to interpret 200 than 212 or anything?
This is what i do every time i have to think about celsius, i have rough equivalency ranges which often get my estimations into celsius within 1 or 2 degrees of the actual answer. All i need to know is a few rough datapoints and i can get a really usable output.
You're missing the point. The issue with Fahrenheit is not about the conversion from Celsius, most Europeans don't need to do that anyway. The problem is Fahrenheit in itself, it's just not elegant or scientific and therefore comes off as arbitrary and only makes sense when you grow up with it.
yeah but why does that matter? It's all relative, the only good thing about celsius is that it happens to line up nicely with one specific elements boiling point. If you're doing science the only redeeming quality is that it maps linearly to kelvin, which is nice.
some of the relative math is nice, for certain units. But outside of that, for like, temperature, and cooking where none of that matters?
I assure you, you get icy roads and snow at 28-30f. Upstate NY gets tons of snow and most of that is above 25f. I don't see it get in the teens too much. Single digits or colder is pretty rare. All depends on the region up here. Due to the lakes, it is all over the place.
it depends on where you are, obviously, but out here we generally don't get snow into about the 20-25f range, and we rarely get snow that sticks around 30f, it does snow then, but it all melts. as i previously said.
idk if they know it like the back of their hand. But to be fair, anybody with the collective ability of about half a brain cell can use the metric system, so that's not really saying much.